A SEO WordPress plugin for Lightroom photographers
Today, I want to share with you a SEO plugin that saved me hours of work on my website : Media Library Assistant. If you are a photographer, if you are using Lightroom, if your site or blog is on WordPress, and if you wish SEO indexing of your images, follow me, this post may help you too !
When I started this blog, I mainly focused about the articles, the photos, the way galleries looked like, the general look and feel. I kept away from SEO considerations, mainly because I did not know anything about it, it seemed complicated, and big, and I did not know where to begin. So I prefered not to start 🙂
On Chase Jarvis’ site creativelive.com, I got to know Neil Patel who teaches the class : “Driving Traffic to Your Online Business”. Pure curiosity at the beginning, I was so convinced that SEO was far too complex… This guy made SEO attractive to me ! I was curious and started to dig. Needless to say my ToDo list increased significantly… And I’m coming to the point of this post : I discovered that I did not have any html image tags on any of my photos. I know now that alt text is used by google and other search engines to index the content of the image. So I started to look out for a method to insert alt text tag on sets of images.
If you want to know move about image tags, I recommand to read Neil Patel’s article 11 Best Practices for Including Images in Your Blog Posts.
I had the choice : either give a distint alt text for each image, lite the filename, king of an index unique for each image, or give the same alt text for series of images. I chose the second option, to write the description of the photo serie in the alt text tag. For instance, all images of my “Meudon Issy Paris” serie will have written “Freescape Meudon Issy Paris by Laurence Bichon” in the alt text.
Changing the alt text tag in WordPress is a one by one image process : you edit the image, change the tag, update and do it again. That’s when I started to do math and calculate how many days I would have to work on my images to make them SEO friendly. I must admit I almost went for compromizes : maybe it’s not this important, maybe I can do it for all new images only.
Then I started to wonder how the process would look like between my Lightroom catalog and WordPress. When my images are ready, I prepare them for the website, by reducing their size and redefining the metadata. In the Lightroom library module, I can give a title to the image. But here comes an issue : I cannot give an alt text to the file !
So now, I have two issues, if I do not want to edit the alt text field for each image :
- when processing the images already in the media library of my website
- when inserting new images in the website
I started to look for a SEO WordPress plugin for Lightroom, and that’s when I came across the Media Library Assistant. Among a big list of functionalities, it allows :
- to bulkedit images in the site’s media gallery, and store the same alt text for all these images
- to load images and make a correspondence between a metadata field of the image one can set in Lightroom, and the tag alt text
Here are detailed instructions written by the plugin’s author David Lingren I copied from his support site:
“
The Bulk Edit area is the Media/Assistant admin submenu (NOT the Settings submenu):
- Go to the Media/Assistant submenu.
- Click the checkbox next to the images you want to change, or click the box at the top of the table to select all of the items on the page.
- Select “Edit” from the “Bulk Actions” drop-down above the check boxes and click “Apply” to open the Bulk Edit area.
- Enter your “one two three” (or whatever text you like) in the ALT Text field (right-hand column).
- Click “Update” in the lower-right corner of the area.
“
Here is an illustration of steps 1 to 3 :
Here is an illustration of steps 4 and 5 :
The Media Library Assistant plugin saved me a lot of time reprocessing my images in the media library of my website for the SEO indexing, and I will use it in my future process when uploading new images as well.
It can be very usefull for photographers on Wordpress ! This is why I wished to share it with you !
That’s all for today.
See you !